He’s a beer guy, and that’s good enough for me.
It reflects the public sentiment of its members, which is not necessarily that of American gun owners in general.
Yeah, since AWB hasn’t really had a hit since “Work To Do”.
And a gardener, too! 
How many members does NARAL have? How about thee ACLU?
Then please explain the Smith & Wesson boycott and other attempts by the NRA to punish manufacturers that step out of line.
I renew my membership every year and I think that the NRA is run by crazy people who get paid millions to be crazy.
My friends dad became a life member before that. He just kind of waved away any concerns about the NRA being a little batshit crazy until they started expressing views on things like taxes and unions (he was a lifelong union member). The NRA members I know who want background checks won’t march on Washington to get it because they feel like they are being vilified so they just become agnostic sometimes with a mild preference for better regulations.
I don’t know if you’ve heard the President discuss AWB over the last few months but when gun owners talk about gun-grabbing, they are talking about things like an AWB.
Not in Montana they’re not.
They may all vote Democrat but all their Democrats support the second amendment.
Some of it is used to issue ads that attack anti-gun politicians. The money is used for politics.
I pay every year because there is a gun show I go to where you can skip the line if you are signing up for the NRA that day. So I basically sign up for the NRA every year to skip that line.
I agree the NRA is not an astro-turf organization.
Let no one say the Administration wasn’t grateful… (Link is to the DOJ’s press release stating that they’ve settled their antitrust issues with Anheuser-Busch InBev SA/NV and Grupo Modelo, allowing their merger to go through.) The date, Friday April 19th, is either one or two days after Mr. Busch’s statement cited by bobot.
As to the OP, agreeing with Damuri Ajashi’s quoted material, the money is nice, but, IMHO, what is more important are the votes and letters the NRA leadership can reasonably threaten to use against legislators. The NRA membership might be a small minority of gun owners, yet they are the loudest voice for firearms owners’ rights, and their advertising products influence many non-members (including myself) in their decision on whom to vote for. I do not see how the interests of manufacturers or gun owners are at cross purposes with regards to most of the activities the NRA performs. Not saying there can’t be a conflict of interest between the two, but I haven’t seen it demonstrated in the thread yet. What form would it take?
Further, the cited manufacturers/vendors, Barrett and Brownells, are not really known for their hi-cap magazines, though I’ve no doubt they sell them. Brownells sells a large variety of shooting related gear, and Barrett’s claim to fame is their .50 BMG rifle. High-cap magazines are a very small part of both of their businesses. If you were citing a company like Magpul, I could see your point.
One argument I guess you could make is that the NRA has been sponsoring competitions to benefit and increase the visibility of certain manufacturers who make ‘non-traditional’ firearms. By which I mean the various ugly black rifles and exotic handguns used in competitions like 3-Gun and IPSC. Anecdotally, at first this met with disapproval from older NRA members, “Fudds” if you will, who didn’t understand why the NRA was sponsoring competitions with guns “only meant to kill people.” Speaking purely ex rectum, my guess is that Fudds were a sizable plurality of the NRA membership, say 25 years ago, yet the NRA was giving visibility to manufacturers who made products that offended this membership group. Now, of course, the AR platform is the highest selling rifle around.
But, as Czarcasm has pointed out, those fees do pay for some of the most unbelievably batshit foaming-at-the-mouth propaganda.
I mean, every group wants to convince you that the world is going to end next week if you don’t send them money to fight (fill in the blank), and I’ve read quite a bit of it from both sides over the decades. But even by those standards, the NRA’s magazine covers at the link are really quite exceptional.
You mean the batshit stuff I linked to hasn’t done the trick? Holy cow.
O.K. I don’t have a horse in this race. Politics pisses me off, and beer makes me happy. Is the above to say that Mr. Busch beer sold his NRA soul to Obama so that he could buy Modelo? (As a beer freak, I am slightly familiar with InBev and their buying “opportunities”)
Like you, I’m skeptical of the claim that it’s all for the gun manufacturers. On the other hand, back during election season, the NRA had a Tumblr page, and it really seems to be more of a celebration of buying more guns than anything else. Now that I look at it, I can’t recall why I remember that this was an official NRA page, but I’m pretty sure I did verify that at the time I heard about it.
I don’t contribute more expecting to get a seat on the Board. I do so as a convenient vehicle to send them more money and get a cool patch for my bomber jacket, when I get a bomber jacket.
Good point. The gun manufacturers support the NRA not to gain control, but to avoid the Smith & Wesson scenario.
Here’s a great Businessweek article on the situation, linked from the wonderful web site longform.org:
The article shows how the NRA acts out of fear that if it doesn’t take extreme positions, it will be supplanted by those who do:
I’ve been hearing that the NRA is under assault from other gun owner’s associations because they aren’t conservative enough. If true, the NRA must work diligently to earn the money it’s paid by the gun manufacturers lest they find a new mouthpiece.
Wow, you poisoned the well with the title. Well done.
The NRA actually represents the gun owners, though their interests surely coincide with those of the manufacturer. If they didn’t represent the gun owner, he/she wouldn’t pay to be a member of the NRA. There are other gun rights organizations around, lots of different flavors for every group you can think of, like the Gun Owners of America, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, and Pink Pistols, a LGBT gun-rights organization. Yet the NRA is far and away the largest such organization. Clearly they align well with their membership.
As far as representing gun manufacturers, they have savaged two different companies in my lifetime for what they perceived to be actions damaging to gun owners, Smith and Wesson and Ruger. They would put the hit on any company that they perceive to be undermining their goals, which are to preserve gun rights and to prevent creep in gun laws. I don’t necessarily like the way they do that, but that’s their goal. One would hardly begrudge NARAL for opposing any restrictions, real or tacit, on abortion, but the NRA gets creamed for it when it comes to guns. The NRA is composed of its members and it represents them relentlessly regarding its single issue, its reason for existing, gun rights. Weird, then, that they are somehow expected to compromise and give ground on that issue. thats not why they exist, and that’s not what they do.
You think they represent manufacturers? Nope. they back manufacturers inasmuch as without them there are no guns for their members to buy. They are all about their membership.
Oh really? Having read the thread, can you point to the resulting tummyaches?
Who is this ‘one’ you’re speaking of? Because even Planned Parenthood is vilified these days among a certain fairly sizable segment of the body politic, and whatever they’re saying about Planned Parenthood, they’re saying much worse about NARAL if they still regard NARAL as a threat.
Again, among a certain (though different) fairly sizable segment of the body politic.
And, oddly enough, for the same underlying reason in both cases.
What was your point again?
Yes, really. “Overzealous” gun owners? Please. Totally unnecessary.
I paid to see “Toy Story,” which does not mean Pixar is representing me. Not for an instant do I believe the NRA is, as you put it, “all about their membership.” Not when the manufacturers are such a big cash cow for them and so well represented on the NRA’s board.
Like most large organizations of its sort, the NRA exists for the purposes of the NRA. It’s a self-sustaining thing now that seeks to make itself bigger.
RTF: That is exactly correct. If you don’t know the difference between “gun owners” and “overzealous gun owners”, and that “overzealous” poisons the well, then I don’t know what to say.
I’d like to get to a deeper point, though, and that’s a theme I’ve been running with lately about the difference between the two parties coming down to the different sets of things they regard as problems.
Time (not so long ago) was that the parties had very different beliefs about how to solve the problems of the day, but for the most part they concurred about what the problems were. (Imagine a Venn diagram with the circles mostly overlapping.) Sometimes - not always, but sometimes - you could find common ground as a result.
Nowadays, in the Venn diagram of what Dems and the GOP regard as problems, the circles barely touch, and that’s why our politics is so screwed up. You may be able to compromise between liberal and conservative approaches to an agreed-on problem, but it’s hard to compromise if neither side sees the other side’s problems as problems. Why negotiate if it’s not something that needs to be negotiated to begin with?
On abortion, of course, it’s easy to see why one side’s problem is the other side’s nonproblem. NARAL regards restrictions on a woman’s right to choose an abortion as a problem; the pro-lifers see abortion itself as the problem. But one would hope that either side could step back and see why the other side has the inverse attitude towards what constitutes a problem.
With guns, it’s a bit different. We gun control folks regard innocent people getting killed with guns as a problem. We can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t consider that a problem. But for all practical purposes, the pro-gun side doesn’t consider it a problem, because no discussion of solutions is acceptable to them. (Other than more guns in a society already awash in them.)
This is why we have a problem with the pro-gun lobby being the way it is. We should recognize a common problem here, and be trying to find some sort of common ground to solve it. The abomination, in our eyes, is the unimportance/nonexistence of this problem from the perspective of our political opponents. I can understand why the pro-lifers don’t see abortion restrictions as the problem. But I can’t say the same about the pro-gun folks.
Unnecessary? Maybe. But the ‘oh really’ was about having poisoned the well. If so, where are the tummyaches? If that word in the thread title has poisoned the well of this discussion, show evidence, please. This is GD.
Christ. If this is what passes for rhetoric these days in GD it’s pathetic. I’m not sure what the fuck you mean by “where are the tummyaches” but I can tell you that when I read the thread title I rolled my eyes and feel like I have to hold my nose to respond to such idiotic discourse.
“Who does the NAACP really represent, uneducated blacks or guilty white liberals?”
“Who does the Democratic party really represent, overzealous urbanites or corporate money?”
I could go on and on. How about this to draw a more thoughtful debate:
“Do gun manufacturers wield too much influence in the NRA?”
See, that’s the sort of neutrally-worded question that makes people from both sides of the aisle come to a thread and offer opinions (Do I really need to explain this to you?)
As it stands now I have no interest in answering the loaded question in your OP, because clearly you would think I’m an “overzealous gun owner”. Instead to get things back on track from your stupid wide-eyed cloying question in your last post I have to state what is utterly obvious to anyone, and say, well, I have a fucking tummyache from your thread title and think it’s useless to engage in any kind of cogent debate to address the topic of your thread, since clearly you have no idea how to actually, you know, debate. So, yeah, you poisoned the well for me. And I’ll bet a bunch more.